Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

BANGER · Shooter · 2017

Steam Deck Verified

The verdict

BUY IT.

A BANGER at $19.99.

Length
9h
Value
$2.22/hr
Reviews
91% positive
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Length
9h
main story (HowLongToBeat)
Completionist
45.9h
100% (HowLongToBeat)
$/hr
$2.22
price ÷ main-story length
Price
$19.99
as of Sep 24
Reviews
91%
9,455 reviews, as of Aug 1
Players
750K
owners (estimate)
Released
2017

Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel HD Graphics 4200 NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M AMD Radeon R5 M240, 12 GB of storage. Windows only.

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition is an enhanced version of the real-time strategy classic, Halo Wars, updated to run natively on PC. Halo Wars: Definitive Edition includes improved graphics, new achievements and all of the DLC created for the landmark real-time strategy game.
Description from the Steam store page.

What drives the score

How to read this

Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.

Raising the score
Reviews91% positive
Gates the score. Weak reviews cap it, and nothing reaches BANGER without strong ones
Replayability~46h to replay
Co-op and replay time. The value score counts hours well past the 9h main story
MonetizationNone
Checked: no in-game purchases or loot boxes. Nothing is docked
Holding it back
Value$2.22/hr
Price per hour of game. It moves the score inside the ceiling reviews set
For context
Length9 hours
How much game you get. Hours feed the value per dollar
Reach750K+ players
How many own it, a popularity + confidence signal
Refunds3 of 667 reviews
Steam-purchase reviews sampled whose writer refunded the game. Nothing is docked

The value story

The lowest price on record is $4.99, set in January 2022. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 55 in the 9 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.

On value it sits in the top 4 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 73 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 87 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Sins of a Solar Empire®: Rebellion ($19.99, scores 92) beats it on value, while it beats Supreme Commander 2 ($12.99, scores 75).

$35.16 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $19.99.

This site sampled 667 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 3 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 74 percent of the 861 reviews written there were positive, against 91 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.

9 hours to finish it, 46 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 5.1 times the campaign.

It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 9 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.

The drop-off

71% start to 1% rarest
050100rarestfirst achievement

No achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements

Players

187 players at peak in the last day.

The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.

What players say

"smash em" "ramming" -me when warthog special i played this on the Xbox 360 as one of my first ever halo games but never got into the multiplayer so i wasn't too disappointed when it was offline still very peak game. also sergeant forge my beloved will be missed halo wars 2 pc port when? (10/10)
ploplophopRecommendedafter 8.0h9 found this helpfulRead on Steam

Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.

No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).

Cite this score

Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.

BANG Score badge

The live badge. It shows the current score wherever it is embedded.

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition scores 85/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/459220/halo-wars-definitive-edition
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<a href="https://steambangers.com/game/459220/halo-wars-definitive-edition"><img src="https://steambangers.com/api/badge/459220" alt="BANG Score" width="340" height="80"></a>
[![BANG Score](https://steambangers.com/api/badge/459220)](https://steambangers.com/game/459220/halo-wars-definitive-edition)

The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.

Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.

A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.

Tags

Details

DeveloperEnsemble Studios
PublisherXbox Game Studios
GenreShooter
Released2017
Achievements75